When Lamido Sanusi called Yoruba politicans areaboys, I wrote him off as a financial jihadist, but overtime I settled down to analyze the message and not the messenger.
Individually, an average Yoruba is more educated and intelligent than an average Fulani. However as a collective and organization, I am beginning to wonder whether Fulani are not ahead of Yoruba in terms of collective intelligence, based on their current outing planned for 16yrs, even if we choose to ignore their historical imperialism across west Africa.
When they were compelled to give up power in 1999 and 2003, and sold a dead on arrival Yar Adua presidency, they came together in 2006 and planned a route back to power, unlike the Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw that would have gone into a separatist frenzy like a boy fouled and says he is taking his ball home during an ongoing football match. Instead of tribal bigotry and separatist ill feelings, its high time Yoruba and Southerners psychoanalyze their collective psyche to find answers against Northern hegemony.
The Fulani have organized their sociopolitical sphere that they can confidently choose a non-Fulani to push their collective Northern interest, like with Gowon, Murtala and Abacha, while the Yoruba haven’t articulated and united their sociopolitical sphere that cuts across the South and Middlebelt, so the leadership can’t trust a non-Yoruba to push their interests.
Now, the pertinent question is what determines collective intelligence and why is Yoruba comparatively low, if at all? The measure of collective intelligence is the percentage of the collective that understands their origins, linkages and aspirations, and have the means and motivation to achieve the collective aspirations.
The difference between Original Africans and Afroasians is while Fulani hold onto their Arabic culture to mould their collective, Yoruba the largest original African cultural group has confused its cultural identity and allowed itself to be restricted by outside definitions of Yoruba, imbued through Abrahamic dogma and academia. The miseducation of the highly literate Negro. As we know on the family level, those who forget home and culture are doomed to suffering. Omo tio gbagbe Ile so apo iya ko.
First and foremost is the issue of cultural identity attached to the word Yoruba. The term Yoruba is a recent collective term for peoples from culturally related city states – Ekiti, Oyo, Akure, Ijebu, Ikale, Ilaje, Igbomina, Ijesha etc but were given the foreign inspired name of Oyo. Some of the city states used to be under Oyo Empire, some under Edo Empire while a lot were autonomous.
Though the peoples that inhabit from Rivers Volta to Niger were not previously given a single collective label, they shared a common origin tied to Ife and most important the same 16 sector (Odu) information retrieval system that told their history and set their moral and cultural values and organization. The subregion was known as Guinea on maps by outsiders, then the slave coast, then the Nigger Area, aka Nigeria, of which 70% were Original Africans.
With British colonization bringing together a larger piece of original African culture together than Oyo and Benin political empires since they didn’t cover the whole cultural sphere, our cultural origins and linkages dictated our cultural identity, regardless of the names given by our colonists. This cultural identity and foundation dictated by Ifa should have been our rallying point across what became known as Yorubaland, Edo, Ndigboland and the entire South and Middlebelt. As the Attah of Igala stated, Ifa is the connecting link between all Indigenous people of Nigeria, it is our identity! Unfortunately we were miseducated to see Ifa as a religion, instead of a complete advanced social system and knowledge bank that included not only religion, but science, history, medicine etc
Moreover, the British promoted cultural disorientation by breaking up the Ifa-Afa-Iha-Eha-Fa based Southern Protectorate into Western and Eastern regions in 1935. Not only did this result in the split between the Niger Congo ethnolinguistic groups and cultural sphere, but inspired infighting like the revolt of Oyo and Benin against their common cultural origins. If Edo had not challenged Ife, the cultural linkages of Yoruba to Edo, Igala and Ndigbo would have been crystal clear and inspire unity.
Ultimately, Edo was broken off as another region, while the Northern protectorate remained untouched and presented a false unified cultural identity despite 40% of the Northern protectorate being of the Southern cultural complex. Unfortunately the South was busy balkanzing itself and couldn’t challenge North leadership over their control of Original Africans in the Middlebelt. At the core of the Omoluabi, ‘Gods creations’ according to IFA, now labelled Yorubaland, Oyo fought to wrestle power from Ife since its twin sister, Benin now had its own region.
Our history and cultural foundations were limited to the citystates that became empires by being winners in the European slavery arms race period from 1500 to 1800AD, while the previous tens of thousands of history were conscripted to the dustbin of history. The only authentic history permitted was those witnessed by the Whiteman. Not the Ifa corpus shared among all groups in South and Middlebelt that covered our history from evolution of humans, which has now been proven right by DNA and other modern sciences. We became Yorubas without a single reference to our history encoded in our information retrieval system. There is nowhere in Ifa corpus that mentions the word Yoruba.
Despite the post-1935 Southern Protectorate supremacy battles, Ooni of Ife managed to wrestle sociopolitical power through Awolowo and became Governor of the Yoruba area just like the Sarduana of Sokoto headed the Northern protectorate. With the break off of the Eastern region, the Igbo politicians were sent home from Yoruba land and other regions, and without Igbo cultural custodians able to authenticate their relevance, the Western culturally miseducated elite took power.
However, Oyo was not contented with the status quo, so used its Aare Onakankanfo Akintola backed by the Northern caliphate to sack the Ooni and imprison Awolowo. Shortly afterwards, our economic and political freedoms were arrested with military coups that changed the terms of our independence into a centrist neocolony.
For us to leave this centrist neocolonal stranglehold, we must correctly articulate our cultural identity, from a meaninglessness tag to what really defines us, according to Ifa amd genetics, which is the Omoluabi, Gods very first creations of South and Middlebelt Nigeria: Original Africans of the Niger Congo ethnolinguistic family, a continuum of dialects. This does not advocate for the change of the name Yoruba, especially because of its brand value, but in addition to the Yoruba name we must also adopt and inculcate the true meaning of its Omoluabi tag as God’s first creations, the Original Africans. This would enable them to understand the difference between Original African and Afroasian spheres.
As long as we are restricted by the foreign tag of Yoruba, our perception will be limited and our collective intelligence will be lower than the Fulani that accept their Futa Jallon homeland thousands of miles away, and even further to Medina to create a single school of thought, a bona-fide branch of Islam known as Maliki. An understanding and acceptance as Omoluabi will enable a global perspective, especially of the Niger Congo ethnolinguistic family that spreads from Gambia to South Africa, a much larger sociocultural sphere than those of the Afroasians. The Omoluabi mantra will reduce the Southern schism of Ife versus Oyo and Benin, Yoruba versus Igbo, Igbo versus Ijaw, Tiv versus Kwararafa that only serves to provide enough cracks to be exploited in the Original African cultural and political platforms.
The restricted Yoruba cultural perspective restricts its political influence and have never been known to select beyond their tribe or even clan. Instead they select their wives, friends and family to push personal interests second to the Fulani or Oyinbo platform that backed them into power. It is now rumored that a Yoruba governor backed by Fulani and British interests has employed a professor from his home state to sabotage the 2023 Yoruba agenda of restructuring pushed through the South and Middlebelt alliance.
If Yorubas can’t increase their collective intelligence to make certain sacrifices to build an Original African South and Middlebelt alliance over the next 16 years, like the Fulani did to get Buhari into power, we shall continue the status quo for the next 84 years, and hopefully by 2100 the future generations would be collectively wiser. If we don’t give ourselves brain according to local parlance, based on the 250yr cycles since Afroasiatic imperialism started in Bornu, there might be no Yoruba or original Africans left in West Africa by 2250. The homeland of Original Africans would gradually become Afroasiatic or annihilated like the blacks of ancient Egypt and North Africa over 2,000yrs.
All hope is not lost if Yoruba can shun immediate short-term power play benefits and behave like an Omoluabi to build the South and Middlebelt sociopolitical platform over the window of opportunity from 2023 for 16yrs. This involves a massive public awareness program to change public opinion and perceptions about our cultural identity and linkages.
Our collective intelligence was not moulded from birth but through huge investments in propaganda. For example, $100m was disbursed by MacArthur Foundation for propaganda to get Buhari into power. Fulani have Gamji and other think tanks to proactively mould public discourse and opinion. So we must find tangible resources to counter the age long propaganda that started a thousand years ago in Bornu.
The good thing is if a lie travels for 1000yrs, it would take truth just a few years to catch up and at less cost. Instead of the trillions already spent on our cultural disorientation by Islamic and Western cultural imperialists, to disseminate the truth of our true Original African cultural origins and linkage would cost about a $100m.
Failure to proactively increase our collective intelligence on our true identity, by 2023 and when the window closes in 2041, might mean we would have to wait till 2099.
